God of Christianity

God of Christianity is presented not as an independent acting character but as the theological and symbolic opponent in Varg Vikernes’s account of his beliefs. Vikernes contrasts the Christian deity with Odin, describes church-burning as a way to strengthen the Christianity he intends to oppose, and later rereads Burzum’s early music as Odinic rather than Satanic. The contradiction is central: God of Christianity matters in the narrative as the object of a conflict whose terms Vikernes repeatedly rearranges.

The Opponent in Vikernes’s account

While on trial, Vikernes described himself as a worshipper of Odin, whom he associated with war and death, and characterized Burzum as existing exclusively for Odin. In that formulation, Odin is set against God of Christianity: the one-eyed Norse god becomes the rival of the Christian deity, and the music is assigned to Odin’s side of the divide. God of Christianity is thus introduced through a relation of opposition, not through any account of the deity’s own actions or attributes.

The contrast also gives Vikernes a way to define what Burzum means. He later explained that the name signifies darkness and argued that, if democracy presents itself as light and goodness, his chosen position would be darkness and evil. In a further reversal, he said Burzum’s darkness was really the light of Odin. The book’s phrasing preserves the paradox: darkness is not simply the opposite of light, but a rival claim to it, with Odin’s light displacing the moral symbolism usually attached to God of Christianity.

Christianity as a target and instrument

Vikernes’s account of church-burning turns opposition into a deliberately paradoxical strategy. He said that he and his associates supported Christianity because it oppressed people, and burned churches in order to make it stronger, so that they could eventually make war against it. In this argument, the immediate target is not God of Christianity as a theological idea so much as Christianity’s public power and condition. The book notes that Vikernes and Øystein Aarseth told a Kerrang! journalist they had been raised as agnostics or atheists, and interprets their hostility as directed less at Christian cosmology itself than at a weakened Church that had abandoned its former draconian conduct.

That distinction makes the stated motive more than straightforward destruction. Burning churches is presented as an attempt to provoke or restore the opponent before confronting it. The proposed conflict depends on Christianity being strong enough to resist: its weakness is treated as a reason to revive it, while its oppressive character is offered as the reason to oppose it. God of Christianity consequently stands at the center of an ideological reversal in which resistance to Christian authority is framed as a struggle that requires that authority to regain force.

A retrospective Odinic reading

In a later defense of his work, Vikernes argued that Nordic religious themes had been present in Burzum from the beginning. He cited the debut song “War” as honoring the Odinic idea of dying in battle, described “Lost Wisdom” as heathen, and connected other songs to Odin, Germanic people, and Norse myth. He also said that Aske’s title described Odin’s Reich in the present and the future of God of Christianity. This retrospective account places the Christian deity within a historical succession imagined by Vikernes, rather than treating the deity as the subject of the music’s devotion.

Vikernes further claimed that “Dominus Sathanas” was the only title on Aske that could be called Satanic. The assertion narrows the apparent evidence for Satanism even as it acknowledges why the association arose: the book observes that Vikernes’s earlier public statements and his involvement in Black Metal had helped create that impression. His later account therefore does not erase the earlier framing; it competes with it, recasting the religious conflict around Odin and God of Christianity.

The limits of the figure

The book presents these claims as part of Vikernes’s capacity for self-mythologizing: he selectively emphasizes and reinterprets aspects of his actions rather than simply recounting them without alteration. His later insistence on an Odinic continuity makes God of Christianity a fixed adversary within a story whose emphasis changes—from provocative Satanic imagery toward a claimed heathen foundation. The deity’s narrative significance lies in that contrast and its reversals: Christian authority is denounced as oppressive, treated as too weak, and imagined as a power that must be strengthened before it can be fought.